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Comment by panon | Hacker News Reader

If getting home by 5.30 is important, you should look into moving to Sweden, 6 hour work day ? Also free health care and blondes!

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Not for Software Engineers. Never for software engineers.

In Austria and Germany ~40h/week work weeks are common even for developers (lived more than 8 years in both combined and worked as a programmer in several companies almost this entire time). Usually If you work more than 40h in one week you can compensate by working fewer hours in the next one.

I think this is common to all EU countries, save for maybe the UK (don't know, but they seem to be a bit less socialist than continental western europe).

The EU's Working Time Directive provides a right to work no more than 48hrs per week. In my experience, while I agree that here in the UK it's a little less socialist, I believe it's rare to see excessive hours. Most (anecdotally) office workers work around 40hrs/week; including developers and engineers.

I'm in the UK, do 37 hours, home by 4.45 each day, don't let anyone tell you you need to work every hour in the day to succeed.

Same here, apart from I'm home by 6pm, but I cruise in at 10am

A hearty fuck you on behalf of all European engineers doing unpaid overtime :)

And a hearty fuck you you should give to those making you do unpaid overtime :)

Most European software teams have a strict "no over time" policy that's both respected and enforced. Some company's even turn off the Astrix and e-mail servers at night.

We all know what kind of shit code you produce after working to long, it's not helping anyone if you do that every week.

Engineering should be striving towards excellence, not creating more shit and more work for everyone.

blondes?

Nah, we never get the blondes :(

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